Hint: Hover over buttons and album/artist name next to the cover for more info.

Reviewers Rating

1 review done for this album.

Zimmer pirates, now with guitar!

By:

LadyInque

Date:

21 May 2011

Rating:

I remember borrowing Klaus Badelt’s score album for the first POTC movie from a friend. Forty-five minutes and what sounded like two musical ideas later, having listened to the whole thing, I thought, “That’s it?” Since then I haven’t really paid attention to Zimmer’s scores for the franchise, content to note them when they came up in the queue. Those tracks were often Zimmer-long and Zimmer-bombastic, not styles of his I appreciate. So I prepared to hate this score, but I was pleasantly surprised. It’s not brilliant, but it features toe-tapping callbacks to the themes from the first film in a generally lighter setting.

One thing that makes it lighter is the inclusion of Spanish-influenced guitar from the duo of Rodrigo y Gabriela. On “Angelica,” the sound is acoustic, technically impressive stuff you expect from flamenco, but not from a recent Zimmer summer movie score (MI:2 was a while ago). “The Pirate That Should Not Be” is basically the Pirates themes in the flamenco style, which means the guitars are sometimes used more for rhythm than pitch, in a weird, urgent way. “South of Heaven’s Chanting Mermaids,” is the mermaid theme played on those guitars. Much of this is inoffensive, relaxing music. I’m not sure that’s what they were going for.

“Mermaids,” of course, begins with haunting, ethereal vocals, which is what history has taught us is the way mermaids sound. At this point, between the flamenco guitars for a character with a Spanish accent (Angelica is played by Penelope Cruz) and the ghostly female song for the sirens, I’m getting a little weary of the cliché in this score. “Mermaids” is the longest track, and it picks up tension as it goes, eventually busting out in full Zimmer action ostinato, reminiscent of “To Die For” from The Lion King, with some of the chromatic scale elements from Sherlock Holmes.

All the old themes are here. Tracks 1, 10 and 11 contain the most of what you’ve heard before. The latter two constitute what I assume is the “mega-happy ending” of the movie. They are pleasant. The rest of this album consists of remixes of nearly every track, which have not been uploaded to SST. That’s just fine.